Quine, Willard Van Orman [addendum] | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Willard Van Orman Quine, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, at Harvard, author of twenty-one books and scores of journal articles and reviews, made many significant contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, logic, philosophy of logic, and set theory, and ethics (and ethical theory). These contributions are of a stature that firmly places Quine among the titans of twentieth-century Anglo American philosophy.

In most of his publications following Word and Object (1960), Quine sought to sum up, clarify, and expand on various themes found in that book. Quine can occasionally be seen changing his mind regarding some detail of his prior thought, but by and large he remains remarkably consistent.

The keystone of Quine's systematic philosophy is naturalism. Roughly, naturalism is the view that there is no suprascientific justification for science and that it is up to science to determine both what there is (ontology) and how we know what there is (epistemology). Moreover, Quine maintains that the best current science tentatively and fallibly plumps for a physicalist ontology and an empiricist epistemology.

Since he maintains that what a (formalized) theory says there is is determined by the range of values of the bound variables of that theory, and since the bound variables of the best current scientific theory of the world (viz., physics) range over both physical objects and numbers, then, given his naturalism, Quine's physicalism embraces both concrete objects and abstract objects. He is a scientific realist regarding (observable and unobservable) physical objects and a Platonic realist regarding numbers (or sets). However, in Pursuit of Truth (1980) Quine downgrades the philosophical importance of ontology, including physicalism. He does so because of ontological relativity (i.e., indeterminacy of reference). The thesis is that a theory's ontology can be supplanted salva veritate by any one-to-one mapping of it. Ontological relativity thus engenders an attitude of indifference toward various equally apt ontologies for a given theory, including physical theory so called. At the same time it highlights the importance of a theory's ideology, that is, its lexicon of predicates. The philosophical point of Quine's thesis is, then, that what a theory says there is is less important to our understanding of the world than what a theory says about what there is.

There are two further senses in which Quine may be said to be a physicalist. First, as expected, he rejects Cartesian dualism of mind and body in favor of materialism. In this regard, he endorses Donald Davidson's anomalous monism: token identity, type diversity. Second, he is a physicalist in the sense in which physicalism is opposed to phenomenalism in epistemology (see below).

If the best current scientific theory (tentatively and fallibly) proffers a physicalist answer to the question of what there is, then what does it proffer in response to the question of how we know what there is? The answer is, in a word, empiricism. Quine maintains that it is a finding of science that all that we come to know about the world begins with the activation of our nerve endings.

So, Quine endorses the naturalization of both ontology and epistemology. And although he downgrades the philosophical importance of ontology, he maintains the philosophical importance of epistemology. The central question of epistemology, according to Quine, is How do we acquire our theory of the world and why does it work so well? Any answer to this question must explain the relation between one's empirical data (the "meager input") and one's theory of the world (the "torrential output"). Much of what Quine wrote after Word and Object is, ultimately, devoted to answering this question. His own distinctive answer may be called externalized empiricism in order to differentiate it from approaches of other naturalized epistemologists (e.g., Donald Davidson). Quine's empiricism is externalized in the sense that he takes sets of activated nerve endings as his data and sets of sentences as his theory of the world (as opposed, say, to impressions and ideas, respectively).

In Quine's hands, the general relation, R₁, holding between sets of activated nerve endings and sets of sentences gets analyzed into two relations. There is the causal relation, R₂, holding between holophrastically construed observation sentences and their respective patterns of activated nerve endings, and there is the logical relation, R₃, holding between those same observation sentences, now analytically construed, and standing sentences. Quine schematizes how the child or the race, beginning with verbal responses conditioned to their respective patterns of nerve endings (R₂), could have gone on to achieve verbal reference to bodies, substances, unobservables, and abstract objects (R₃). Moreover, his account of R₃ explains how observation sentences are logically related to theoretical sentences in such a way that no bridge principles are needed for linking observation and theoretic sentences. His account also highlights the hypothetico-deductive method of prediction and falsification and the moderately holistic character of theory revision.

Externalized empiricism is Quine's contribution to answering the central epistemological question of how we acquire our theory of the world and why it works so well. As such, his epistemology (empiricism) "contains" his ontology (physicalism): nihil in mente quod non prius in sensu. However, Quine's epistemologizing always takes place within some accepted theory of the world (the best one he can muster at the time), so his epistemology (empiricism) is itself contained within his ontology (physicalism). This latter containment is the central lesson of naturalism: There is no first philosophy. It is this latter containment that also makes Quine's epistemology such a radical departure from the tradition.

Even though Quine's thought has been remarkably consistent since his first works appeared in the 1930s, he changed his mind on a few important matters. First, he downgraded the importance of ontology, discussed above. Second, in the context of radical translation, Quine dropped the idea that the linguist can translate the native's "Gavagai" as her own "Lo, a rabbit" just in case the native's stimulus meaning for "Gavagai" is approximately the same as the linguist's for "Lo, a rabbit." The problem is with making scientific sense of this "implicit homology assumption" regarding different people's nerve endings. Quine changed to the position that the linguist can translate the native's "Gavagai" as her own "Lo, a rabbit" just in case the linguist can empathize with the native to the extent that she can confidently conjecture that, were she in the native's position when he uttered (or assented to) "Gavagai," then she would have done likewise for "Lo, a rabbit." In this way the linguist is (tentatively) equating the native's "Gavagai" with her own "Lo, a rabbit" without relying on an implicit homology assumption. Third, since, according to Quine's externalized empiricism, the meager input underdetermines the torrential output, then it is conceivable that there could be two (or more) global theories of the world that are empirically equivalent, logically compatible, equally simple, and so forth. Would both be true? Quine's empiricism encourages an ecumenical response: Both would be true. His naturalism encourages a sectarian response: Only one would be true. Quine himself vacillated on the issue but eventually endorsed the sectarian response. This suggests that his commitment to naturalism runs deeper than his commitment to empiricism.

Anomalous Monism; Davidson, Donald; Empiricism; Epistemology; Ethics; Logic, History Of; Materialism; Metaethics; Metaphysics; Naturalism; Naturalized Epistemology; Ontology; Phenomenalism; Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy of Science, History Of; Philosophy of Science, Problems Of; Physicalism; Reference; Set Theory; Subject and Predicate.

Among Quine's post–Word and Object books that bear directly on the topics discussed here are:

The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1966; enlarged ed., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.

Roots of Reference. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974.

Theories and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Other of Quine's later books of interest are:

Set Theory and Its Logic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963; rev. ed., 1969.

Philosophy of Logic. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

The Web of Belief. With J. S. Ullian. New York: Random House, 1970; rev. ed., 1978.

The Time of My Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.

Quiddities. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987.

The secondary literature on Quine is immense and still growing. It includes:

Barrett, R., and R. Gibson, eds. Perspectives on Quine. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990.

Davidson, D., and J. Hintikka, eds. Words and Objections. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969.

Gibson, R. F., Jr. The Philosophy of W. V. Quine: An Expository Essay. Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1982.

Hahn, L. E., and P. A. Schilpp, eds. The Philosophy of W. V. Quine. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986.

Hookway, C. Quine: Language, Experience, and Reality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Romanos, G. D. Quine and Analytic Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983.

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